Thursday, May 19, 2016

For the second year running, campaign group Rabid Puppies has dominated the Hugo shortlists, encouraging its supporters to block-vote for specific titles and authors that they believe have been overlooked because of leftwing bias in science fiction publishing. The vast majority of the “slate” recommended by blogger Vox Day ended up with a Hugo nomination – including, on the best short story ballot, Space Raptor Butt Invasion by one Chuck Tingle.

Tingle’s presence shifted the dynamic of the post-Hugo discussions. Wasn’t his placing on the best of the best of science fiction list indicative of the Rabid Puppies’ true motivations, people asked: not to reward “better” writing, but to simply destroy the Hugos’ reputation? The presence of the author behind titles such as Helicopter Man Pounds Dinosaur Billionaire Ass and My Ass Is Haunted By the Gay Unicorn Colonel does somewhat detract from the grand stature of the Hugos. It’s easy to see why the Rabid Puppies would nominate Tingle; when a tingler appeared on the ballot, they must have had conniptions.

Day initially presented Tingle’s nomination as a way of combating homophobia in science fiction. (“The decades of discrimination against gay dinosaur love in space by the science fiction community stops now, and it stops here!”) but later admitted it was a joke. “I don’t give a quantum of a damn what my critics thought about it. Some things are worth doing simply because they are amusing,” he wrote, following it up with: “Chuck Tingle’s nomination is not a joke. Well, all right, it is.”

So who is he? The easiest answer would be the Rabid Puppies leader himself, Vox Day. But no. “I am not Chuck Tingle,” Day says. “I have my suspicions, but I do not actually know [who it is].” Nora Jemison, nominated for best novel for The Fifth Season, doesn’t know either, or “even if they’re only one person”.

I am flattered that there are those who believe that my writing is good enough for me to secretly be the Hugo-nominated Shakespeare of our time. But alas, that is not the case.

Speaking of Literally Who, the SFF/SJWs keep throwing in VD's face that Tingle is "trolling" him by selecting her to accept his award. They have not yet realized that they must therefore give SRBI the award and therefore Rabid Puppies the victory.

It's telling that they waste all this time on trivia (WHO is Chuck Tingle really? It doesn't matter!), because they are afraid that if they don't do this, attention will focus on other matters, like WHY the Hounds Of Hell (the Evil Puppies, donchaknow) decided to get this book on the Hugo ballot.Oh, they'll pretend they know why, but it's a Red Herring, to lead people away from "If You were a Dinosaur, My Love" and other such towering works of monumental execr... err, I meant literary quality.

"Chuck Tingle is clearly either Charlie, the evil brain in a jar, or Neil Patrick Harris."

We have a winner. Yep, all ghostwritten by Doogie Bowser, Doctor of Buttology.

Like the former teevee dialogue, the plots are forwarded to Doog from an anon source, which nobody has yet identified. It is curious, however, that the plot packets arrive monthly from the same institution that houses Chuckles Manson. Sure it's probly coincident, butt there you have it.

Tingle has to up his game to writing kaiju erotica. Think of it, Godzilla, Gamera, and Monster Zero gang raping McRapey and destroying Tokyo in the process. I swear, a tear rolls down my face just thinking about it.

I doubt Chuck Tingle is a single individual. There might be one person cranking out the fiction (fifty stories in two years!), but surely he has someone else to do the Twitter personality and someone else to do the professional-looking YouTube vids.

As the beer ad says, "That can't be just one man."

Chuck Tingle has been poking fun at Vox, but before he did that, he poked fun at Martin and Jemisen. Tingle is a performance artist, and it looks to me like his actions are geared toward maneuvering himself into the best chances of actually getting the Hugo.

Nothing in the rhetoric of the left bothers me like the "populist" attack. If a joke is politically incorrect it's populist. A prostitute got voted into the Italian parliament a few years ago [way back now] as a joke - a sort of joke/ protest vote. Good. The place finally had an honest small business woman.

Among other things she opposed Italy's NATO membership and offered to have sex with Saddam Hussein to avoid war. [shades of Lady Godiva?]

Both initiatives might actually have prevented the calamity of total war now looming large. 4 other wars already come and gone and the mass invasion of Europe. All because noone could see the joke wasn't a joke even when it was. Populist jokes aimed at the first butt invaders; borers bore.

It could be one individual as Tingle. When The Shadow was a giant in the pulp magazines, where a new novel got published twice a month, one man wrote about two-thirds to three-fourths of those novels. This was on a mechanical typewriter, in the early 20th century, and for pay rates not unlike today (but, of course, went much farther).

Yeah, it could be done now. Easily. It would require focus and discipline, but it easily doable to do this as a one-man operation.

Phillip George wrote:A prostitute got voted into the Italian parliament a few years ago [way back now] as a joke - a sort of joke/ protest vote. Good. The place finally had an honest small business woman.